The Man In The Mirror
by sapphire-child
Summary: This story documents Charlie’s struggle to find acceptance in our modern world where physical beauty is so prized. In the end, he begins to realise that the only person whose opinion really matters is his own.


**Title:** The Man In The Mirror**  
****Rating:** PG  
**Original Post Date:**28/04/2007**  
Summary: **Watch Charlie's struggle to find acceptance in our modern world where physical beauty is so prized. In the end, he begins to realise that the only person whose opinion really matters is his own.  
**Author's Note:** written for the prompt of "narcissus" on the 50darkfics community on livejournal for my claim of "Charlie and Claire"

* * *

Deep down we're all narcissists he told himself as he painted on a final coat of black nail polish, put wax through his hair, smeared eyeliner across his lower lids and adorned himself with enough jewellery to set off every single metal detector in an airport. 

The truth of that matter was that he'd never been the handsomer son, the better looking brother and even though he always pretended like he didn't care in the slightest, it still bruised his pride when the girls flocked straight to Liam and ignored him completely. It didn't help that Liam seemed to feel the need to tell him all about his conquests – and no matter how good Charlie's bedtime stories are, Liam's are always better.

One night, drunk and angry at all the attention his brother was garnering, Charlie got his own back by getting into a brawl with him and deliberately punching him right on his straight, pretty nose. The bruise under his eyes and the ugly bandaid over the shattered cartilage was enough to keep Charlie happy for several days but it was doomed to be a short term solution and before too long, Liam was raking in the ladies again, using their compassion and sympathy for his battered face against them.

Charlie frankly thought that it was a little pathetic to use sympathy to get laid, but at least he began to think in the long term from there on.

Liam already had a head start with his natural good looks and several years more experience in what the hell to wear but there was no reason that Charlie couldn't catch up to him now – right?

For a long time he had hated so many of his features - his lack of height, his annoyingly cherubic nose, his long, girly fingers – just to name a few. He had once tried to bleach his own hair and ended up with a feral blend of his natural dark brown, screaming orange and white blond instead. His father had refused to take him to the hairdressers to get it fixed and, as such, he endured several months of abject misery until the horrible bleach job finally grew out.

He knew well enough not to repeat that mistake. He began to take better care of his appearance, making up for his lopsided facial features and thin, underdeveloped body with a professionally done dye job and a killer wardrobe. He started flipping through the occasional fashion magazine and somewhere along the way learnt to enjoy shopping and soon enough he started to make every outfit, no matter how casual, look like a million bucks. It's all about the sex appeal – you've got to be able to exude it in order to bring in the ladies and he worked on it like crazy until he finally got it right.

Much to his own surprise, it worked. When you feel like a sex machine you _act_ like a sex machine. Who cared if his ears were lopsided and that they stuck out at a funny angle? If he styled his hair the right way he didn't even notice them. Who cared if his jaw jutted out massively, out of proportion with the rest of his face? A bit of stubble softened the edge of it and made him feel rough and ready.

His teeth still left something to be desired but dentistry was an expensive venture – especially when he was looking at it from a cosmetic point of view. He went as far as he dared with plates and the like and eventually he looked in the mirror one day and decided that he quite liked the toothy smile that returned him. It wasn't quite as neat and even as some of the Hollywood smirks that were so white they were almost fluorescent – but then, he had to have at least one feature that had a bit of character right?

As for the nails…well the girls certainly seemed to like the eclectic mix of black and colours that he went through every other week. Several of them even asked him to do _their_ nails and Charlie was all too happy to oblige them – usually there was some kind of reward in it for him at the end, especially if they were busily getting drunk at the same time.

Charlie's self esteem rose in leaps and bounds from these encounters. He was on an almost even par with Liam and it felt bloody good. The only problem really came when he was first introduced to the drug that would threaten to tear his life and his very sanity apart.

It was a gradual process, what happened to him. The outside skin slowly becoming more and more of a glamorous cover up whilst inside, he slowly began to die. His soul blackened, one piece at a time and he began paint his nails to match. There were no colours that looked bright in his eyes anymore, everything had darkened to black and every time he tried to pull away from it, the drugs would drag him back down again.

On the island there had been no time for precision hair styling and nail polish – and there had certainly been no time for the drugs that he so coveted. When he'd exhausted his stash and gotten through that first horrible night of withdrawal, Charlie had emerged into a surprisingly brighter new world – and one that contained the brilliant smile of the most beautiful girl he'd ever had fortune to meet.

In the real world he would have been falling all over himself, trying to look good to impress her but from the very first day on the island, everything was rough and ready – and somehow it seemed to suit Charlie better that way. He didn't feel under any pressure to dress up nicely in order to seek Claire's company and he had to admit that he was secretly relieved at the return to the practicality of the good old days when getting ready in the morning only took five minutes instead of fifty.

Shaving was far too much of a bother (especially with the abundance of blunt razors that were guaranteed to cut you as soon as you dragged them across your skin) and the lack of mirrors didn't help his cause much either. But in the same breath, he just couldn't stand the grit and muck that got underneath his fingernails the minute he did anything. He could spend an hour just digging underneath them with whatever sharp implement he could find, scraping out the darkness that was creeping back up on him.

Then one day he was gouging underneath his nails with a broken nailfile claimed from someone else's luggage and he stopped abruptly and threw the stupid thing away from himself. If his fingernails were going to get dirty then they were going to get dirty. What the hell could he do about it here anyway?

The thought caught him by surprise, and he wondered when he'd become so blasé about his looks. Once upon a time he wouldn't have even left the house without attacking his hair with some form of styling product and spending half an hour picking out which pair of jeans to wear with which t-shirt and scarf and jacket. Here it didn't matter what he wore – in absolutely every sense of the expression – so long as he wasn't hanging around naked nobody actually gave a shit.

He was surprised when Claire told him one day that he was looking different (and no it wasn't just the fact that he'd finally found a razor to scrape away the tattered beard he'd been sporting for close to three months now) what had he done to himself? Charlie was non plussed and set out to discover what it was that had changed about him. It actually took him a day or two to find a mirror (the one he'd used to shave with had disappeared as quickly as he'd found it) and when he did, it was only a small one at that, barely large enough to fit into the palm of his hand.

When he scrutinised his face in it and really began to look properly at himself, he was surprised to find a collection of new lines forming at the corner of his eyes, folding into the skin as easily as you might fold an article of clothing. Claire was right. He looked…different somehow to the last time he'd shared a long, uninterrupted moment with his reflection.

Older – or maybe wiser was the word he was searching for? Either way, he liked the man he saw in the mirror and wondered where he'd come from.

The awkward boy he had once hated and the frightening apparition of a heroin junkie lurking under the surface were finally gone. Well, the boy still lingered here and there of course, in the snub nose and his dishevelled hair – but in his reflection he certainly couldn't find any traces of the darkness that had been fermenting in his soul for so long.

The man he saw that day in the mirror was someone who had finally become a person worth knowing – not because of the clothes he wore or the initialled ring on his hand or his faded career – because he was finally himself.


End file.
